Ann Agee (born 1959) is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."
Agee has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from Anonymous Was A Woman, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, among others. Her work has been collected by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Early life and career
Agee was born in Philadelphia in 1959. Her mother, Sally Agee, earned an art degree at Syracuse University and exhibited art late in life; her treatment of the home as an ongoing project—rearranging furniture, painting floral designs on bathroom walls or an Abstract Expressionist action-work on the floor—had a strong influence on Ann. Agee studied at the Cooper Union School of Art (BFA, 1981) and Yale School of Art (MFA, 1986) and earned prizes for painting at both. Despite this, she felt stifled by the male-dominated, painting-centric culture at Yale, which conferred presumed status and seriousness on painting over other forms of expression. She turned to work in clay in 1985, drawn by its feel, greater connection to the world, provisional status, and potential as a medium she could lay claim to as a woman.
Agee learned ceramics through experimentation and self-study, aided by grants that allowed her to buy a kiln and produce the work for her first solo show (Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, 1991). Fellowships at the Wisconsin-based ceramics manufacturer, Kohler Co., and a plumbing fixture factory in Guanajuato, Mexico from 1991–3 influenced her practice and thought about craft, labor and production and enabled her to pursue large projects, including a hand-painted, ceramic-tile public mural in Guanajuato and her bathroom installation in the "Bad Girls" show.
In the 1990s, Agee expanded her reputation through shows featuring her figurines, at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, New-York Historical Society and Brooklyn Museum, and solo exhibitions at the Arena and Yoshii (New York) and Rena Bransten (San Francisco) galleries. In the 2000s, she was selected for major group exhibitions at LACMA ("Color and Fire: Defining moments in studio ceramics 1950 to 2000"), the Katonah Art Museum ("Conversations in Clay," 2008), Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Walker Art Museum ("Dirt on Delight," 2009), and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts ("The Female Gaze," 2013). She has had solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W. (New York), Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), and Lux Art (California), among others.
Work
Agee's art disrupts distinctions between art and craft, the decorative and the utilitarian. She commemorates work, the bodily, and aspects of ordinary life, such as domestic objects, chores, environments and narratives, factory labor and hand-craft, industrial processes, and consumer packaging. Writers and curators suggest her work draws on—and recuperates—decorative arts across several centuries (often discovered from museum study), such as 17th-century, Asian-influenced Delftware, 18th-century Meissen figurines and French textiles, and Rococo ornamentation, as well as modernist and Pop art appropriation and industrial ceramic techniques.